Optimize React Native and Expo App Development

React Native Skills is a comprehensive best-practices rule catalog for React Native and Expo apps, covering performance, animations, UI patterns, and platform-specific optimizations across 8 priority-ranked categories.

Reference these guidelines when building React Native or Expo apps, optimizing list and scroll performance, implementing animations with Reanimated, working with images and media, configuring native modules or fonts, or structuring monorepo projects with native dependencies.

33 named rules span 8 categories ranked by priority and impact: List Performance (CRITICAL, 8 rules, prefix list-performance-) - virtualize large lists with FlashList, memoize list items, stabilize callback references, avoid inline style objects, extract functions outside render, optimize images in lists, move expensive work outside items, and use item types for heterogeneous lists; Animation (HIGH, 3 rules) - animate only transform and opacity for GPU acceleration, use useDerivedValue for computed animations, and use Gesture.Tap instead of Pressable; Navigation (HIGH, 1 rule) - prefer native stack and native tabs over JS navigators; UI Patterns (HIGH, 9 rules) - use expo-image for all images, Galeria for lightboxes, Pressable over TouchableOpacity, handle safe areas in ScrollViews, contentInset for headers, native context menus and modals, onLayout instead of measure(), and StyleSheet.create or Nativewind for styling; State Management (MEDIUM, 5 rules) covering minimizing state subscriptions, a dispatcher pattern for callbacks, first-render fallbacks, and React Compiler-specific handling of destructured functions and Reanimated shared values; Rendering (MEDIUM, 2 rules) on wrapping text in Text components and avoiding falsy && conditional rendering; Monorepo (MEDIUM, 2 rules) on keeping native dependencies in the app package and using single dependency versions across packages; and Configuration (LOW, 3 rules) on config plugins for custom fonts, organizing design-system imports, and hoisting Intl object creation.

Each rule has its own file, e.g. rules/list-performance-virtualize.md or rules/animation-gpu-properties.md, containing a brief explanation of why it matters, an incorrect code example, a correct code example, and additional context and references. A single compiled AGENTS.md document expands every rule in one place for the full guide.

React Native and Expo developers who want a prioritized checklist of performance, animation, UI, state, and configuration rules to apply while building or reviewing an app, ranked so list-performance issues (CRITICAL) get fixed before lower-impact configuration cleanup (LOW). Rules within each category share a stable ID prefix - navigation-, ui-, react-state-, rendering-, and monorepo- alongside the list-performance- and animation- prefixes already named above, plus fonts-/imports- for the Configuration category.